It happens so often with college athletes. They look at the prototypical professional athlete, then into the mirror. They focus on the area where they feel they don’t measure up. They sell themselves short by trying to change who they are and quickly become less than they are without realizing why. A snowball becomes an avalanche.
We have all seen the crafty, undersized power forward built more like an NBA small forward. He figures out how to score against bigger bodies. His outside shot is the weakest part of his game. He looks into the future, panics and starts jacking shots from the perimeter, burning into the brains of talent evaluators one clank after another.
Rare is the Charles Barkley or Greg Maddux who knows he’s just fine the way he is, even if others might have thought Barkley too short to do so much damage in the paint, Maddux’s fastball too short to dominate major-league hitters.
Study Kansas University right-hander Frank Duncan, in the home stretch of a strong career, to appreciate how much better the Barkley/Maddux path is than the Clark Kent-into-a-phone-booth attempt.
An effective reliever as a freshman (3.09 ERA) and quality starter as a sophomore (3.23, second-team All-Big 12), Duncan stumbled as a junior (4.20).
He’s back and oh-so-much-better-than-ever as a senior. Duncan takes a 6-2 record and 2.02 ERA against West Virginia into today’s series finale at Hoglund Ballpark.
“I think he’s gotten back to what he is, and that’s a true pitcher, mixing (pitches),” KU’s talented pitching coach Ryan Graves said. “I think a little bit of what the scouts want as a junior got into him a little bit, and he was trying to overthrow the ball and just not getting in good counts and not mixing the same way. Right now, he’s a true four-pitch mixer and throwing a lot of strikes.”
Graves called Duncan’s winning approach, “Simple pitching. Getting ahead and putting people away.”
Duncan came to KU from San Francisco in the fall of 2010 as a walk-on standing 6-foot-3, weighing 183 pounds and throwing a fastball clocked in the 82-85 mph range. Now he’s 6-4, 220. He threw a fastball that lit the radar gun at 90-93 last Sunday.
“I struggled really big last year,” Duncan said. “That’s definitely in my head. You play with a chip on your shoulder after you’ve struggled like that. You’ve been to the top, then you’ve been to the bottom.”
One place he never has been to is the NCAA Tournament. That should change, and he’ll be ready for it.
